Reg Reader and Stockport dweller Rob was shocked to find that trying to save his mother a few pounds on her gas bill ended up pushing the tab up £13,088.43, rather than down the 20 quid he was expecting. It was the unlikely result of entering a meter reading on Southern Electric's website.
Utility companies have a patchy …

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Not just software stupidity.

last year an accuread man took a meter reading from my meter (i had to fill in a card because I was apparently "out" when he came round, despite me hearing the card come through and my car being on the drive, and him having to walk past the gas meter). I filled the card with the correct readings, and the meter reader then duly entered completely different ones on his little device when he could be bothered to actually turn up and read my little card. I got a £3000 bill, and it then took several calls to e.on before one of them looked at the numbers and suggested that it was a little "unusual" to use that much energy in a month. I noted they were very keen to get a correct reading this time around though (entirely coincidentally my bills will be going up by 15% or so, so they will be sure that any overestimate was nullified before the rise).

To be fair...

> Far, far better than those ars*h*les at British Gas.

Retard brigade down at British Gas high command decided to merge my previously separate electricity and gas accounts. Their website now requires I enter *both* meter readings or it fails with a validation error.

My electricity meter is in the house, my gas meter is is in an inaccessible locked box outside.

That would be the same British Gas who managed to switch MY supply after my neighbour gave them the wrong flat number... cue shock billing with my existing provider who based my final bill on an estimate.

... who said it must only be an online account, then deleted my account and said I was going to a more expensive tariff. They said I hadn't used the account so it had timed out -- even though I'd put my meter readings in the month before.

Or maybe it was because I didn't use one of their many domains that they use (scottishpower.com, spenergy.com, scotishpower.fb.lumacentral.addemar.com, scottishpower-online.co.uk, ...). I can't remember now which of these I should keep using lest I'm deemed not to be an Internet (note the capital) user.

And...

And the same British Gas that managed to take over £400 in advanced direct debit in 3 months and saying I had to wait 8 months before they'd adjust how much money they were taking each month. That could easily have meant that they had over £1000 of my money. Hardly worth it for saving the 5% or whatever it was for using Direct Debit.

It's not just Southern Electric

It's not only Southern Electric whose web-based meter reading system can't cope with actual readings that are lower than the company's estimated reading.

A couple of months ago, I tried to enter my own gas meter reading into Scottish Power's web site. It was 20 units lower than the estimated reading on the bill I'd just received, and Scottish Power were proposing to raise my monthly payment by a hefty amount based on their estimate, so I was keen that they should get the true reading.

Their web site refused to accept my reading. It told me twice that I'd made a mistake, and on the third attempt, it told me to expect a call from their customer service department.

After waiting for several days, I called Scottish Power myself, and a friendly customer service person was happy to enter the correct reading. I suppose I should be glad that they didn't try to bill me for 10,000 non-existent units of gas!

I had a similar story with Scottish Power. I had the usual quartely 'your meter readings are due' email reminder. Logged in to Scottish Power and noticed that the previous meter readings were unusually low (in the 00's) instead of around the 7000 mark. Turns out the previous reading was supplied by someone who turned up to read the meter.

I thought nothing of it and entered the correct readings. Scottish Power's website then proceeded to tell me that I owed them £9000. Of course you are then locked out from supplying any different readings for that day. Rang customer services, on hold for 30 minutes! (Argh) and was told politely by the operator that she was also locked out of editing my account. However, to her credit she at least rang me back 15 minutes later to say she'd had a word with her supervisor and managed to correct everything. Although she did say check the follow up bill and call them back if there were any problems. I notice this becoming more common practice these days, get the customer to do the work that the service/utility provider should be doing themselves and not allowing to happen in the first place.

I tried this...

One million cubic feet

One unit on an older gas meter is 100 cubic feet according to http://www.gas-guide.org.uk/meters.html . 10,000 units would be one million cubic feet.

The average home floor plan is reportedly 91 square meters, which is about 980 square feet. Allow ten feet of height (which is more than adequate!) and you get something like 10,000 cubic feet in an average property. So a wrap-around on the meter would completely fill 100 average properties.

The Joys Of User Friendly Automation

Couple of big phat phails there. Communications phail. Behind-your-back game-changing phail. Customer expectation phail. And so on, and so phorth. At least they're promising (after the victim done and gone public) to not actually demand the customer pony up for their greedy stupid stuff, but of course with a company full of phailure like that, everyone else'll be thinking "we'll believe it when we see it".

As a prudency measure, just how likely the gas meter has run up to 9999, back to 0, and up to slightly under the estimate, eh? It's unlikely even if it's below the previous estimate (if that was an estimate), so it's hardly reasonable to set your own estimates in stone. Inviting the customer to get stung with an outrageous bill in the name of customer friendlyness is just that more icing on the cake.

The worst thing is, of course, that it's entirely avoidable. A couple seconds thought, playing "what if" scenarios, and if that's too hard (and what're you still doing playing developer, or worse, project manager for this customer facing project, eh?), there are rich online resources with lots of discussion. A good one is the old RISKS list (or digest), and its archives. I'd read it more often if it wasn't so depressing. Pretty sure these peeps have earned their mention there, too.

Just, huh? If that's a feature, then the person who designed it needs to have a severe re-think. Sure coping with the 99999 roll-over might have a little bit of logic, but when you're in the 13000s, it's rather unlikely...

Even if she had used all that

Umm - my meter (replaced with a brand new one last year) actually has 5 digits before the decimal point. So this makes no sense? Yes, loop at 100,000 - but not at 10,000. Methinks there could be more to this than the explanation given?

Metric vs Imperial

Metric meters increment 2.83x faster than imperial ones (m^3 vs 100's of ft^3), so adding an extra digit to metric meters also means they'll not wrap-around any sooner than an imperial one given the same volume of gas flow.

Scottish Power don't

With last years cold spell my daily electrical useage spiked at 65Kwh - about 2.5 times normal. Got to love the rotten storage heaters my landlord has fitted :(

At the same time my fixed price deal came to an end and it was a month before I clocked on.

The didn't call me, but I did get a nice message when I entered my meter readings that my monthly direct debit was going from £40 per month to £106, some haggling got it down to £90, but I'm seriously considering moving somewhere warmer - ideally with no snakes though

Funny, EON wrote to me when their meter reader made a balls up (instead of reading 05454 or whatever, he'd read 15454). They didn't state the amount, they just said "mind checking your meter reading and giving us a call, you're due a large bill and we want to make sure it's right". Much better than the heart attack of receiving a 5-figure bill.

I ended up figuring out how much gas they reckoned I'd used, and it was half a gasometer's worth. You'd have thought they might have noticed that much gas going missing ...

DrDGCC

Nah.

Rob's mom was obviously running an iron smelting foundary in her garden shed, and not declaring the profits to HMRC. Stands to reason...Evidence abundantly clear. (Well, clear enough for British plods).

Iron smelting foundaries tend to generate a lot of steam as you cool the steel, which makes them difficult to hide. You can stick up a Leyllandi hedge but people tend to notice huge plooms of white vapour, and consequently HMRC know where 80% of the foundaries are.

More likely to be some furuistic advanced fractional cracking process splitting the methane into carbon for the production of man-made diamionds and the hydrogen for sale to all the Honda Clarity owners in Stockport (although I'm guessing a quick check of the DVLA records would show up an illegal hydrogen production facility).

eh?

Muppets

Not only the biggest logic fail I've ever witnessed, given they have prior history on the user's account in order that they could do the estimate, but they even felt the need to state that they wouldn't actually be charging £13k - no shit, that'd be illegal. Utter muppets.